Healthspan Lifestyle Change — Living Better for Our Children (I)

As I said recently, I am not a wise man —just a bridge: one between the wiser among us and the rest of us — you and me. Peter Attia, MD, is one of those sages. His medical practice, his research, and his care strategies are all aimed at a single purpose: increasing people’s longevity and the number of years they live in good health. That is, helping people live longer—and live well.

So perhaps Peter Attia has something to say to us—evidence-informed [i]—about how we might live, for our children, longer and better.

I felt compelled to engage with his work because the topic has come up again and again in recent conversations. One father, for example, said to me while looking at his two-year-old daughter: “You know what’s sad? When this little one turns 40, I’ll be 84.” Another father told me he felt pushed to lose weight and take better care of himself because he wanted to be present for his daughters—not “check out early” like others in his family. A mother shared that she joined a gym “to be around longer for Alberto” (her son, name changed).

In fact, this is the same reason why Diego, as he told us, decided to change his lifestyle.

Now, in Outlive [ii], Peter Attia lays out the reasoning behind his mission: an alternative, science-based, proactive approach to medicine—one that seeks to understand why we age and decline, and what we can do to slow that process down in order to live longer, healthier lives.

I’ve brought back a few of his core ideas from that journey—ones I believe are worth reflecting on together.

In this post—and, given the scope, in a second one I’ll be publishing alongside it—I’d like to unpack what seems most relevant to us.

A quiet summer morning in the kitchen. While he cooks, they wait — not just for breakfast, but for a kind of presence that lasts.

Why We Resist a Healthspan Lifestyle Change — Even When We Know We Should

I want to draw attention to our lifestyle and its relationship with chronic illness. We’d all agree that eating well, sleeping well, and exercising are desirable habits, and that they would help us toward that goal. Yet I’m afraid most of us never truly commit to these changes, because we haven’t fully understood just how important and relevant lifestyle actually is —how much it shapes the way we age, and the condition in which we arrive at that stage.

And that’s where the idea of a healthspan lifestyle change becomes crucial. It’s not just about avoiding illness—it’s about actively shaping the quality and resilience of our aging process. But I suspect part of what holds us back lies in our everyday understanding of what health is. That is: even if we say that being healthy means more than just the absence of disease, in practice, we behave as if that weren’t true. We say we shouldn’t drink Coca-Cola, because we know it’s harmful—yet we keep drinking it. We say we should sleep more, and sleep better—yet we never do. We never really do.

Of course, this lack of understanding isn’t the only thing that explains our inaction. There’s also the fact that we live in a truly demanding world—especially in the United States—a world that often feels alien to us Latin Americans. We don’t feel at home with the idea that work should be the center of our entire existence.

This wears us out.

And it’s tied to another point—though not reducible to it: changing our lifestyle means changing the way we live. And that kind of change carries an emotional weight that doesn’t fall equally on everyone.

As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts: for someone who carries a deep emotional wound, still open, making that kind of shift is very hard. Sometimes, it becomes the work of a lifetime.

But I think medicine itself plays a key role here. Our understanding of health can’t be fully grasped without acknowledging the role that medical practice plays in our lives.

To us, it’s only natural that doctors, hospitals, science, and technology exist.

We see news about medical breakthroughs. We’ve lived through —and many still talk about— the invention and mass distribution of vaccines during the pandemic. These are things people in the time of the Black Death never saw. Nor did the Indigenous peoples of the Americas when the Europeans arrived. This kind of medicine, the one we’re most familiar with, also operates under the assumption that health is, fundamentally, the absence of disease.

And while manifestos and official declarations may claim otherwise, the truth is that most of the research —and most of the techniques developed in medicine— have been focused on curing. That is: on intervening once harm is already present, whether through medication or procedures, like surgery [iii].

But this kind of medicine has little to say when it comes to our deeper concern. This medical paradigm doesn’t truly understand how cancer or diabetes come about, because its thinking is centered on attacking consequences. It’s a way of thinking that classifies pathologies and develops effective treatments for each: lung conditions as lung conditions, heart conditions as heart conditions, and so on.

It has generated a system of specialists —some who understand the lungs, others the pancreas, others the kidneys, others the heart... But without a real concern for understanding how the overall functioning of the body gradually gives rise to these chronic illnesses —which tend to appear with age, yes, but which share something deeper in common: they’re dysfunctions in the integrity of body’s physiology [iv].

Peter Attia would say we need a different kind of medicine—one that tries to understand not the consequences, but their causes, much earlier [v].

A New Kind of Medicine

Medicine 3.0 is an approach that seeks to understand the root of the problem. To borrow Attia’s own metaphor: it doesn’t try to mop up the water once the storm has hit; instead, it studies the weather and asks whether it’s better to build a barge or strengthen the roof.

It asks: Why does a body that should function well—and in fact does so for most of its life—begin to break down?

And more urgently: Why is it breaking down faster now? Why are we seeing a rise in conditions like type 2 diabetes—a disease that was extremely rare before modern times—cancer, and neurodegenerative illnesses?

What’s going on? What’s happening?

Things start to fail, but we only notice it when it’s too late.

Medicine 2.0 has left us with a misleading image—though, to be fair, even that medicine doesn’t exactly endorse it, but it has served it well in public discourse—an image in which practically everything that happens to us is genetically determined. Not only the process of maturation and physical deterioration.

But none of this can be truly separated from our context. And beyond that, no one has actually studied it thoroughly, until recently. No one has looked at aging longitudinally, with different variables and case studies, to understand how it really works.

What makes us live longer? What changes how our bodies function over time?

That’s what this other approach—what Attia calls Medicine 3.0, and which he defends and promotes—is concerned with: proactively cultivating health [vi].

Because what they’ve found is that the healthier we are, the longer and fuller our lives can be [vii]. And that this state of health depends largely on how we live — especially on three core elements:

→ how we eat,

→ how we move,

→ how we sleep.

And yes, we already “knew” this. But when he explains it, it becomes clear—at least to me—that it’s much more important than I had ever thought. That’s part of the wisdom I want to share here.

And I want to do it in a simpler way—because, truth be told, the structure of his book is a bit confusing—so I can better capture the core of his intuition and pass it along to you.

To help draw attention to what matters, and maybe even inspire you to step a little outside your comfort zone and start thinking about all of this. In that sense, my goal is the same one Diego pursued in his post. I’m just taking a different approach: a more argumentative one.

You’ll find that attempt in the next post.

Notes

[i] Peter Attia and Bill Gifford, Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, First edition (New York: Harmony, 2023), 50.

[ii] Attia and Gifford, Outlive.

[iii] Attia and Gifford, 47.

[iv] Attia and Gifford, 43.

[v] Attia and Gifford, 31.

[vi] Attia and Gifford, 54.

[vii] Attia and Gifford, 59.